Virgil's Handcrafted Root Beer

A cane-sugar craft root beer that leads hard with anise and licorice rather than the creamy vanilla most American palates expect, then carries warm baking-spice notes of nutmeg and cinnamon over a sarsaparilla-tinged base. The body reads full and the sweetness runs high, though that richness comes more from sugar than from any genuine cream character, and carbonation tends to sit on the softer side. It is a polished, additive-free bottle that lands as a connoisseur's spiced root beer, more apothecary than soda fountain, which makes it divisive: licorice-friendly drinkers rate it highly while creamy-vanilla traditionalists find the post-reformulation recipe busy and off-center.